Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure the adequacy of the transfer of alerts relating to patients with learning difficulties between different health care providers.

NHS England is working in partnership with NHS Digital to develop a reasonable adjustment flag to be added to the medical records of patients with a learning disability.

This will alert clinicians across the health service to an individual’s specific needs, allowing them to make reasonable adjustments, and see what adjustments have already been made, to facilitate a more bespoke approach for the individual to access healthcare more easily.

Reasonable adjustment flags will support the implementation of the Accessible Information Standard, which sets out a specific, consistent approach to identifying, recording, flagging, sharing and meeting the information and communication support needs of service users, and which all organisations providing National Health Service care are legally required to follow.